Hello - Today I had a lovely, relaxing day (apart from the 300 Kms I drove) with my good friend Karen. We decided to drive to Al-Ain for the first coffee morning the ex-pat ladies there have started to host at the Hilton Hotel. We had already met Liesel and Taryn when they had come down for our coffee morning at Khalifa City, so we decided to take a day off and go visit them for a change. I love Al-Ain ! It is super to drive into the city - there are real-life sand-dunes along the way and in the distance, of course, there is a super mountain (which I told you about somewhere below in this blog!) It is lovely and green too and all in all a really lovely community. Now that I met some 23 ladies who live there, I think it's an even nicer community than I had first thought when I knew nobody there, if you know what I mean.

So we arrived at 10 a.m. (which meant I had to get up at 6 - aaaaaaaaaaaargh)!! I picked up Karen at 8.30, filled the car up with petrol, started on our way and discovered I had forgotten the map behind. Turn around, pick up map and off to Al-Ain - we were only late by about 20 minutes which wasn't too bad, really!! Chat, chat, chat, chat and so we came to lunchtime when the ladies asked us whether we'd like to join them for lunch - of course, sez 2 little piggies after gorging on sandwiches and cake and gallons of coffee all morning !! So lunch it was then our new friend, Birgit - the proud owner of Saluki dogs invited us to her house to introduce us to her dogs - yippee ........... off we went to meet 3 beautiful dogs and a cat. I tell you, animal lovers tend to migrate to each other automatically :-)

Set off at 4:15, refill car whose tank was half empty (never, ever set off on a long journey without a FULL car) to arrive home an hour (or so) later. All in all a great day. Karen is a super navigator - I would have got hopelessly lost since I don't know north from east - as I always say, North is in front of my nose - wherever I might be looking - tee hee!

We promised we'll be back to their next one - next time with a visit to the zoo to see the giants they have there. Today that had been the original plan but the zoo is being refurbished :-(

Now it's 18:52 ............... dinner is not even thought of let alone cooked; Pete is out for his nightly walk and I really, really need to go feed, 4-footed friends and sort out something for the 2-footed one too :-) I'm not hungry after the huge tortellini plate I was eating at 2 o'clock - chuckle !!

Thanks again girls - a most enjoyable day! Tomorrow and the next 8 days - I BEAD my new project which is on a very, very tight deadline....... More about this one later.

Have a good one
x